All right, hopefully, can everyone see that? Okay. All right, cool. So let me just begin by following my colleagues in a really warm welcome to all of you for literally zooming in virtually from, I think many, many locations. It's wonderful to have you joining us and I'm really excited to get to meet you and talk with you as much as I can throughout the day, today and tomorrow. So so thanks again for visiting us. I'm Millie solvent. If I haven't met you, I'm a professor and also associate chair and Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering. And my research is in the area of biomaterials and drug delivery, particularly gene and RNA therapies. And so I'll be looking forward to talking and sharing more about that later today. What I wanted to do just over the last few minutes in the morning presentation is to give you some samples and information of, of kind of what you would see walking in the door here as a graduate student in our PhD program. Have a brief overview of the first-year experience that you're looking at right now. And I'll walk through that in a little bit a detail. And then I want to spend most of my time talking about really a kind of a comprehensive thinking and working process that our faculty and students and alumni have been working on over the past two years towards redesigning training for our PhD students. I'm really excited to get to roll that out in fall of 2021. And I wanted to share with you why we did that and what does it look like? And certainly take any questions if there's time. So, so to begin with here, this is a snapshot of the first-year experience. And what you'll see here is really kind of a combination of things that are going to be operating in parallel. And so you'll see on the left-hand side, a very high-level version of the coursework schedule that you would be tackling. And I'm going to talk more about this on the next few slides. I'm including core courses and electives, as well as I'm launching into research while then completing some of your, your coursework. You'll see that the majority of your coursework is done in the first year, including, um, all of your core courses and a number of electives. And then additionally, we make room and have time for both advisor selection, which is occurring really through a process that launches as soon as you walk in the door here at, at, at Delaware, assuming we twist your arm, their presentations from faculty, you have lots of opportunities to meet with faculty and students and ultimately will match to a lab in, in, in the November timeframe. And so that processes one we we have become quite experienced with. I think it works quite smoothly and also, and it really is a way that we are able to, especially with the diversity of our faculty and the large number of projects to really link all of our first years up with projects they're really excited about and that are a good fit. So the qualifying procedures, the other thing you'll see here, this is sort of the end point to your first year of graduate school. And this occurs at the end of August. This is a combination of an oral and written examination. These are research focused m. And so what you'll be doing is to be providing information and overview on your research progress in your research plans and answering questions on your progress and plans. And certainly as they in many cases, may relate to principles of our discipline. So sort of the high level overview of some of those things that you would, you would see. And so what I wanted to then spend some time on is this new training I mentioned and we we've been discussing as a department. But I think this goes beyond our department into conversations that we have seen in the discipline related to how we train our graduate students. And I think one of the things we realize that, that catalyze this process is that while we have had for years a really, and we've continued to have a discipline that's built on incredibly versatile and powerful principles and some great coursework. We and also other departments across the US and even outside of the US, have maintained a very similar training program from the standpoint of curriculum for, for decades. And we questioned that sort of observation as to whether that was consistent with what we knew to be the case in terms of the profession more broadly. And so just a few things here that you may be well aware of, but I think are useful to look at in a few snapshots. And so here in particular, thinking about the versatility of the chemical engineering nearing tool set. You, you know, what these tools are. But I think when we think about the ways to apply them, what is increasingly clear if we just look at the presentations you just saw is that there's enormous scope and diversity of what we can do with those tools. And it's been expanding at an incredible rate. So how can we see that? Well here this is just some snapshots of the multi-disciplinary nature of important problems which extends to chemical engineering. We know that collaboration across disciplines is a standard. What you're looking at here is really a snapshot in a quantitative sense of the changing profiles and authorship. So numbers of authors on papers is, is a very simple metric, but it starts to highlight this idea that we collaborate more and more now than we ever did before. We can see this multidisciplinarity in our own discipline by taking other sorts of snapshots, we can look at our, our, our group, our American institute of chemical engineers, that we consider disciplinary home. And we see again a reflection of that broad diversity of research and technological arenas that we are able to contribute substantively too. And we've seen this in terms of the foundational changes that have occurred, but are continuing to occur in terms of problem-solving and problem types and our discipline, we know that life sciences has become an important component in our discipline, reflected in, for example, the change of our department's name as well as many others, and the increased number of research efforts in faculty and graduate students in careers in those areas. We've seen enormous expansion in the sort of fusion of computational tools and data science with chemical engineering principles. And so here a quick snapshot. You don't need to read the small, the small print here, but a quick snapshot of themes that we know are, are really becoming key components of our own profession, as well as many other topics. And so I've listed sustainability as, as one of the other broad areas that we are seeing and that we have had enormous focus on, especially with new centers at a Delaware. And so last snapshotted as, as far as this topic of expansion in the scope and diversity of our field is something that I think really impacts you as the next generation. So that the, the career and postgraduate landscape that you have at your fingertips is incredibly diverse. You have a broad variety of work opportunities. You can work on fundamentally different problems than you would've if you graduated even ten years ago. We've seen incredible changes in the kinds of things that we as chemical engineers need to tackle is problems in the last year as we think about how to rapidly manufacture things like vaccines. And so I think really incredible opportunities for graduates from our discipline. And so this sort of was the contexts for our conversations as a department and as a set of stakeholders from our department that included our alumni as well as, as students and faculty. As a department, we defined a strategic goal a couple of years ago to redefine our graduate training and to do that in a way that would be more modern, that would be modular and enable much more adaptation and multidisciplinarity and training that supports a research interests. And we saw a number of benefits and i'll, I'll just quickly highlight these. But I think we have recognized that our training should be and would be valuable if accessible to a much more multidisciplinary and diverse student pipeline. For example, there's more and more people who are getting degrees at the undergraduate and graduate level in different subjects with great benefit. That's hard to do right now in chemical engineering graduate training, we need to cast chemical engineering problems and principles in the context of a much wider variety of the problems we know we're working on in research and industry and expose all of you to have a broader variety of chemical engineering as it is applied. We see instructional benefits to this. And finally, I think it's important knowing that there is a, a broad conversation about this amongst multiple departments that we be leaders in taking a role in reshaping what is the training for our discipline. And so a quick snapshot of our process and, um, and then I'll, I'll, I'll close to, to send you off to too many other things today. We did our redesigned by collecting data on, on what we thought was important. This is done through a series of surveys and conversations of those stakeholder groups. I mentioned faculty, students and alumni. Some of the things we've seen and that I hope you see in the quick snapshot of our new curriculum is that we saw a great emphasis on problem-solving that was much more open-ended. That would focus on, on principles and techniques stemming from experimental designs, statistics, etc. In order to solve problems. Real interest in emphasis on the molecular scale principles of our discipline in ways that they can be related to a variety of both fundamentals in terms of structure, equilibrium and dynamics and then also then corresponding problems in application areas. More exposure of all of you to complex systems in that irrelevant to our tools and biological systems, soft materials, complex fluids and other things, and finally increasing our training and soft skills. So I don't know that I like the term soft skills, but, but this is sort of the category we call it, but Communication entrepreneurship, understanding of the multidisciplinarity of our field and other topics. And so don't worry about the gory details, but we've developed a modular curriculum. These are two credit bytes and you don't have to read every one of them to get a sense for what we have tried to do. What you'll see is that we have really then redesign, repackaged, and changed the way that we'll offer our courses in a way that we think will reflect these, these broad for goals that we had. So for example, incorporating new modules and really focusing on research, problem design and data analysis as a core initial component of training. Incorporating molecular scale focused training in our, in our, in our fundamentals of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering. Incorporating opportunities via the potential for concentrations in a variety of different application areas. For our discipline, I'm including here broadly soft materials relevant themes on biological themes, themes in catalysis and energy and themes and in process and systems analysis. And finally, incorporating now new training in what we've term soft skills but communication and really opportunities to understand both your role as a graduate student, in your role as a member of the profession through enhanced curricular training. And so what I'll end on as kind of a last slide before closing for if we have time for a question or two and then, and then moving on to your schedule for the day. One example of this is this seminar class that is going to be building on our existing seminar, which we have on a number of Friday's, typically, where we will have this seminar class now taught and taught by multiple faculty, but also really an opportunity to learn about things that range from what does it mean to be a PhD student that you need to know when you walk in the door to, how can you conduct research? How do you balance work and life in grad school and research? What does it mean to be intrapreneurial as a researcher, et cetera. But bringing together multiple faculty as discussion leaders and instructors as well as both first-year students. And then a new requirement that our senior students will retake this one's for opportunities for peer mentoring, et cetera. So really quick walk-through. I want to, I want to stop there in terms of the formal presentation and
Grad Curriculum Motivation 2021
From Mark Blenner February 16, 2022
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